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The performances are there and the atmosphere is ripe with ominous foreboding, but Magic Magic doesn’t have a compelling narrative to make it engaging enough. Instead you get a paranoid clinger ruining everybody’s vacation.

A vacationing insomniac loses the ability to distinguish dreams from reality while traveling the Chilean countryside with a group of adventurers that includes her best friend and an enigmatic American in this downbeat saga.

Magic Magic starts intriguing enough, with trippy details and a creepy/campy Micheal Cera. The rest of the cast also did well, with Juno Temple as the shy insulated girl from the US.

But no matter how convincing Temple can be as a mental breakdown waiting to happen, the film just piles on red herrings without attempting to give any narrative hooks to make you care about her spiral.

The film keeps on shifting from cabin horror (horny teenagers have a vacation in some remote location and unknowingly set something nasty on themselves) to the mind bending psychological thriller (the film is played out through the point of view of the crazy lead who can’t separate reality from dreams/hallucinations) and can’t seem to decide on which by-the-numbers plot it should be.

As a result Alicia’s neurosis, the center of the movie, is wearisome. The film egg you on until it runs out of ideas and peter out with an anti-climactic ending.

Magic Magic aims to be a dark psychological thriller but ends up being a tedious attempt at creating horror out of stylized dread.